The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City (Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South): 17

The Nashville Way, the first scholarly work and the first history of civil rights in Nashville since David Halberstam’s The Children, fills a gap in civil rights and southern historiography. It should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of Nashville and the African American struggle for racial justice during the movement for civil rights.

–Linda T. Wynn “The Courier“

Houston has effectively revealed the turmoil and struggle behind the veil of racial etiquette and gentility in this southern city.

–Victoria Wolcott “American Historical Review“

Houston’s book details the particular nature of the Nashville community and the way civil rights unfolded there but also adds to our understanding of the civil rights movement more broadly. It is engagingly written, even gripping at times, and its audience should include the educated bookbuying public in and around Nashville.

–Tracy E. K’Meyer “author of Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980“

Nashville, Tennessee had perhaps the most fully formed of the student-centered civil rights movements that emerged in the early 1960s. Houston tells the story of this movement in substantial depth in this fine monograph.

–D. C. Catsam “Choice“

The civil rights saga of Nashville in the decades following World War II is a complicated and bittersweet story of struggle and resistance, change and continuity, success and disappointment; and Houston captures it all with a rich narrative of black and white southerners engaged in a historical drama of national and even international importance. The first book to offer a comprehensive and balanced study of the city’s distinctive racial and movement cultures, The Nashville Way fills an enormous gap in civil rights and southern historiography.

–Raymond Arsenault “author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice“

Any interested in black power and white response in the South will find [The Nashville Way] a specific title, perfect for college-level social issues holdings.

—Midwest Book Review

BENJAMIN HOUSTON is a lecturer at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. He is the former director of the Remembering African American Pittsburgh oral history project at the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy at Carnegie Mellon University.